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I’m one of those people that has a zombie apocalypse plan. I know where my friends and I will rendezvous, what our plan of action will be, and what role each of us will play in keeping the group alive. I’ve long maintained that my role, in the case that we have to resort to cannibalism to keep the rest alive, will be to die and feed my friends.
That’s morbid, yes, but realistically, I wouldn’t last very long anyway. I’m not nearly fit or strong enough to fend for myself, and I have no survival instincts or knowledge on how to survive in the wild. I was raised in a tiny city that’s so densely populated that it’s near impossible to ever be truly isolated from society. If I somehow managed to get lost in the woods, walking an hour in any direction would probably lead me to a highway. I also love creature comforts way too much – a world without the small joys I’m used to wouldn’t be one I want to live in, anyway.
2024 Is The Year Of The Survival Game
2024 is absolutely stacked with survival games.
It’s probably that lack of survival instinct that makes survival games so terrifying to me, even when they’re not necessarily built to be scary. Survival games have always set me on edge, which is why my experience with them now is so limited. The first one I ever tried was the critically lauded Don’t Starve, which is notoriously a punishing experience even to those with experience in the genre, let alone a newbie.
What I found interesting about my experience with the game, though, is that it frightened me more than it frustrated me. Maybe that was partly because of its Tim Burton-esque art style or its creepy environments, but it was also because of the overwhelming fear of the unknown it instigated in me. I knew I wasn’t safe, and I didn’t know how to protect myself from the elements or the dangers lurking in the night. I was acutely aware that I was simulating one of my worst fears: dying in the woods, terrified and alone.
My second foray into the survival genre, and my last to date, was a random attempt to get into Rust, which scared me in an entirely different way. On its face, Rust isn’t frightening. When you start a game, it dumps you on a sunny beach and lets you run free in the sand – what could be scary about that? But it’s not the game that’s scary, it’s the players. Not knowing any better, I started playing on the official server. I woke up on the beach and started looking for materials. Within five minutes, somebody had shot me in the head, and I didn’t even know they were there. I tried again. Same thing.
Apparently, this is common practice. Serves me right for not doing my research.
Maybe this is because of my upbringing in a very safe city, but I am an inherently trusting person. It hadn’t occurred to me that in a game without monsters, it was the people playing it I’d have to be afraid of. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there – I was still trying to figure out what to do with my sticks and stones when I’d been killed. It didn’t matter if I was a threat or not, because eventually I could be.
To me, that’s more frightening than being alone in the woods. There’s a reason why almost every piece of media exploring a dystopian world highlights that other people are your biggest threat – danger turns people into individualists. They’ll kill you for resources, because you’re a threat, because you might one day be a threat, or just for kicks. For me, survival games portray my worst nightmare, creating worlds where you either fight tooth and nail against nature to stay alive, or you live around other people and are constantly terrified of trusting the wrong person and getting murdered in the middle of the night. Those things scare me to death, and that’s why I don’t play survival games any more.
Survival Week at TheGamer is brought to you by Nightingale – available on PC in early access February 20
Survival Week
Welcome to the home of TheGamer’s Survival Week, a celebration of all things, well, survival. Here you’ll find features, interviews, and more dedicated to this popular genre, brought to you by Inflexion Games’ upcoming open-world survival crafter, Nightingale.
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